Starbucks' plan to open 200 new shops is not the economic blessing it might
seem.

The plan by Starbucks to open 200 drive-through coffee outlets goes right against the spirit of the times. Nick Clegg, caught on camera with one hand cupped to his nose above the vapour from a little mug of espresso as if sampling an embarrassing smell, called this “a bit of really good news in an otherwise gloomy week”. Surely not.

It would give jobs to thousands of young people he said. Perhaps so, though I can’t remember ever being served by a British youngster in Starbucks. But what about the rest of us?

At £3.30 for a medium-sized praline mocha, a daily habit would set you back more than £1,000 a year. This sum could be going towards the deposit for a house or bootees for the baby.

It all dates from the great divide in British daily life a generation ago, when people started buying sandwiches from shops for lunch instead of bringing them from home. I sometimes think that the economic crisis since 2008 was brought on by people running up credit card debt that could have been paid off with all the money they wasted on shop-bought sandwiches. The same goes for coffee.

In any case, a coffee from Starbucks has been found to contain an average of only 51mg of caffeine. That’s fine for pregnant mothers who want to ease back on the dangerous drug, but for me the higher the dosage the better. Researchers from Glasgow University found that an independent café called Patisserie Françoise in the bohemian Byres Road of that ancient city notched up more than six times as much caffeine per cup.

Even so, if this is a decade of austerity, why not take the hit at home instead of on the way to work? Forget dinky espresso machines. My old friend Marsh Dunbar showed me the best way of making coal-black coffee. She would take an earthenware jug. Put in a little mountain of ground coffee. Add water, just off the boil. Wait seconds, not minutes and pour out two cups strong enough to bring on the shakes. The grounds stay in the jug. It’s magic – and cheap.

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The playwright David Hare tells me that he is to be animated. This month he is to don a “motion capture suit”, like Andy Serkis playing Gollum, and be filmed by dozens of cameras at once to produce a virtual image of himself for an animated version of his dramatic monologue The Wall, about what Israel calls the “security barrier” with the West Bank.

Sir David said at the Toronto Film Festival recently: “It’s a thing that is rarely discussed and almost taken for granted.” Oddly enough, the morning after I learnt about the project I flew off to Israel. In the next few days there I heard plenty of discussion about the wall. But discussion, especially the heated kind, is something the Israelis seem to manage better than we do.

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It was bad enough having guards on trains making endless announcements between each station, dragging us back from the welcoming arms of Morpheus. Now every driver on the London Underground fancies himself as an alternative comedian.

All we want is to go to work and home again as painlessly as being squashed into a sealed wagon allows. Instead we get: “Room for a little ’un, as the actress said to the bishop. Mind the doors. Cheer up. It could be worse, it could be raining.” The comic patter is the wasp in the diving suit.

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Just as canaries in mines once gave warning of dangerous gases, so now toads are credited with being able to predict earthquakes.

This has only provoked the proprietor of Toad Hall to add another verse to his Song: